Maximum Ride: To the Limit

Chapter 1

"They're almost here." I looked down at my precious little Phoenix, my daughter. "Are you ready?"

"Ready?" She gave me an ugly look. "I'm starving!"

"Okay, kid," Iggy, the blind guy who somehow always has his eye on you, said as he landed on the edge of the cliff gracefully, folding in his ginormous hawk wings along his back.

"You guys are slow," Phoenix complained, eagerly eyeing the bag that Iggy was carrying.

Fang lit on the rocky cliff beside Iggy, folding in his own massive, dark wings. He shook his long, dark, and shaggy hair out of his eyes. "Get it yourself next time."

Phoenix rolled her eyes. "And you're the one always telling me that I can't fly out by myself." She crossed her arms.

"Looks like she got too much of you, Max," Fang eyed me sharply.

"Do you ever listen to yourself?" I snapped back sarcastically. Well, it wasn't all sarcasm. Fang had said his fair share of snarky and snide comments over the years.

"This is a really weird conversation to be having in front of Phoenix," Angel pointed out, her strawberry blond curls flowing in the breeze.

"How is it weird?" Gazzy chimed in. He was Angel's biological, older brother.

"Gazzy," Nudge, a sweet and talkative little thing, grumbled. "You know, the birds and the bees."

"Let's just, not talk about it anymore," I sighed, realizing the implications.

"Does this mean we're finally eating?!" Phoenix's impatience was building.

"Yeah," Iggy said, "let's eat." So we all sat down on the rocks and began our feast of store bought bread and bologna.

"So," I said between chewing, "I was thinking recently."

"You do that?" Fang didn't miss a beat.

"Good one," Phoenix smirked, giving her dad a fist bump.

"Playing favorites," I muttered lightheartedly, earning me a giggle. "Anyways, I was thinking about, well..." I wasn't sure if I was ready to drop the bomb, to be honest. But I'd brought it up already; there was no going back now. "I was thinking about Dylan."

Everyone stopped chewing: Phoenix, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gazzy, and Angel. The scene was silent.

"Max," Fang said just the one word sternly, and he stared me down.

"You heard me right," I said, my gaze against his. "Dylan."

"After everything that happened?" Iggy asked.

"Didn't you choose Fang?" Nudge asked, a cold sweat breaking out on her face.

"Look," I said, breaking away from the constant eye contact with Fang. "As much resentment as I had built up for him, he was one of us. Not only that, he was a part of us. Part of the flock."

"That's what you think?" Gazzy refuted. "After he split us in two?"

"He wasn't the one who split us all apart," I declared. "We did that to ourselves." I paused. "I did that to us, specifically."

"But you wouldn't have," Fang said, "if it hadn't been for him."

I sighed in defeat. "Fine. If that's what you guys think, I won't even mention it again."

"Good," Fang affirmed.

We finished our dinner without a word, and the sun was set soon enough. Because it was summer, my second-to-least favorite time of the year, the moon rise signaled to us that it was time to settle down for rest.

So we made our way back to the cave in which we slept every night. We had some real fancy beds in there of course. Dried out pine needles and everything.

As everyone else drifted off to sleep, I couldn't help thinking about the topic at dinner. I knew Dylan wasn't perfect, but neither was I. Yet they hated him. What was the difference?

Wasn't he genetically coded to be my perfect soulmate? Did that include being compatible with the flock? If not, then they programmed him severely wrong. Because nothing could separate me from my flock.

Not for long, anyway. I tip toed out of the cavern and into the moonlight. Then, I spread my glorious brown wings and took flight. I'd be back before they even noticed.

I took a brief moment at the cliff's edge to gather all my thoughts before beginning the roughly-hour-long flight to the mainland, America. Bringing Dylan back was going to take a lot of risks, but I'd been a life-long daredevil.

Right before I took my first downbeat to carry myself across the water, I heard an all-too-familiar set of wings behind me. I turned to see Fang, shadowy as ever in the night.

"What do you think you're doing?" Fang asked, landing right in front of me without a falter.

"You won't like the answer," I said.

"You're looking for him," Fang glared at me, piercing into my soul.

"And you think you're going to stop me," I filled in the obvious.

"Max." Fang took a deep breath. "You know how much this hurts me, right?"

"You know how much you hurt me when you replaced me with my clone, right?" I snapped.

"One, Maya is still her own person, no matter what you think," he was irritated. "Two, don't use what happened in the past like that."

"So why do you get to use what happened in the past on Dylan?" I asked, leaving Fang frozen.

Finally, he sighed. "If you're going to go find Dylan," Fang said, "then I'm at least going with you."